Hal Foster's "Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics"

·49 min·4 clips

Hal Foster recalls seeing an abstract painting that felt more beautiful than Mount Rainier, sparking a lifelong desire and class-conscious critique.

The conversation starts with Los Angeles art-world timing. With Frieze, Felix, and PST around them, Kate Wolfe and Medea Ocher place Hal Foster's Fail Better inside a city busy with art events. Foster quickly moves backward. He remembers arriving in New York when the city was broke, cheap, and still had room for critics and artists working near the edge. The academy sat somewhere else. Contemporary art and critical theory, as he tells it, were not just peripheral to academic life. They could be treated with open hostility. That distance mattered. Foster describes himself and other critics as beneficiaries of a later institutional turn, when universities started making space for the work they had once kept out. The market got there first. As money moved into the art world, and as Reagan- and Thatcher-era neoliberalism changed the mood, Foster says the art world became the art market. Opportunity came with a strange kind of loss. The academic world opened just as the commercial art world became harder for some critics to live in. Margins got blurry. Foster contrasts downtown New York's earlier survival culture with his later place inside a privileged university, where support brings its own pressure. Wolfe and Ocher let the conversation sit there, between biography, art history, money, and criticism. Fail Better comes through as a record of how artists and critics deal with systems that first shut them out, then pull them in.

As heard by us

Hal Foster traces how art criticism moved from New York's margins into institutions shaped by the art market.

Hal Foster's Fail Better: Reckonings with Artists and Critics gives the LARB Radio Hour a sharp, contained frame for a larger question: what happens to criticism when the art world is pulled toward the art market.

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Why you'd press play

You can hear Hal Foster look back on a New York where broke late-1970s margins, a hostile academy, and a rising art market reshaped where criticism could live.

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